dumbness usually comes from lack of information, humans are the same way - the difference between other llms is that if opus has information it has a ridiculously high accuracy on tasks.
This is not really fair, the story is never explicitly discounted as hyperbole in the article and follows a range of other more mellow criticisms of europe. Also, directly following this quote, is the question: "Could anyone imagine Chinese or Americans being so obedient?".
None of this points to the story being out of place, and since the author specializes in serious analysis of china's relation with america, and the author brings up europe, its fair to assume that they included this story as a relevant criticism of europe.
In that regard, its indeed not of the same quality as the analyses of china or american culture.
My father passed away on Saturday. The aftermath drove home the importance of community.
Hundreds of people came to the funeral, even though it was short notice (24 hours) and in the middle of holiday season. They all dropped whatever they were doing, hopped in their cars or on a plane and came. Friends from his childhood. Friends from his middle/high school years. Friends from his university years, and med school years. People he had worked with and done community service with over the decades. His former students from the decades he taught at the local university. Employees at the hospital he worked at. Family friends. Friends of family. People who knew him by only name and yet still wanted to pay their respects.
I'm Turkish, and community has always played a big role in our culture. But the past few days made me realize that, ever since immigrating to the USA 20+ years ago, community had been supplanted by individualism. Like the author, I work from home. I do have a bit of a social life, and there's a couple of meetups I organize, but the size of my community is nothing compared to my parents. It makes me sad.
Reading this article gave me some hope. It reminded me that ultimately it's a matter of putting in the work, which I am determined to do. Not because I want to maximize the number of people who come to my eventual funeral or anything like that, but because I do want to live a richer life and the best way to do that is to share it with others.
Sorry if the above was all over the place. Things are still raw.
I'm sorry for your loss. It sounds like your father was a great man. No need for apologies, I think what you said is very poignant and relevant to the topic at hand. We should all be so lucky to live such full lives.
Not the OP but I just got done with a codebase-wide re-architecture (driven by a need for a complex data migration) in a little ~2.5 weeks. 800+ files changed, 60k+ line diff.
Without AI it would have taken me several months, and that is only if I managed to avoid burnout. The vendor quotes we got just to see if we could outsource the work were all six figures.
>> I write a lot of SQL and I haven't had these issues for months, even with smaller models. Opus can one shot most of my queries faster than I could type them.
Same. SOTA models crush every SQL question I give them.
I think this might be a big part of the problem with the conversation about AI right now. The models have become so much better in the last ~6 months in my experience and lots of people wrote them off 1-2 years ago after they couldn't do x and 'we've hit a wall' was being thrown around everywhere.
No it's not. It's just the Post Office trying to save money by being slower. This quote from the article describes it (note the last sentence in particular):
"Potential Delays: Because most postmarks are applied at processing facilities, the date inscribed may be later than the date the mail piece was first accepted by the USPS. This discrepancy is expected to become more common due to the implementation of the "Regional Transportation Optimization" (RTO) initiative and the adoption of "leg-based" service standards."
Why would something picked up from you box not be considered within the postal system's control? Does your box not get picked up from daily?
Also as a slight bit of victim blaming, why would you not drop something of this importance and time sensitive directly into a more controlled drop off?
> why would you not drop something of this importance and time sensitive directly into a more controlled drop off?
In some places I'm sure there will be ICE deployed to make sure nobody who doesn't look American enough will need to prove they are American before they can vote. In their place I would suggest mailing it early to make sure the vote is counted.
> Why would something picked up from you box not be considered within the postal system's control? Does your box not get picked up from daily?
It does. I live on a rural route and as far as I can tell it doesn't get postmarked until it actually processes through the closest city's PO. They get backed up sometimes, I guess?
> Also as a slight bit of victim blaming, why would you not drop something of this importance and time sensitive directly into a more controlled drop off?
It wasn't anything that important - I think it was either a holiday or birthday card. The only reason I knew at all is because the recipient didn't get it until about 7 days later and told me when it was postmarked.
not sure what the point is. this is possible, clearly as that's what has happened. i'm only asking why with the known situation that something left in your personal box not getting postmarked as expected for whatever reasons would you allow something of this import to be handled that way? you only file taxes once a year, and most people only vote every four years. making arrangements for that infrequent to have a piece of mind something was postmarked as expected doesn't seem too outlandish to me. i even stipulated potential for victim blaming suggesting if you read the context that i was in no way suggesting whatever you want to think is a gotcha
It could be argued that if a) there is not reasonable, reliable method of determining and documenting when a voter casts their mail-in ballots, and b) we all agree that there must be a deadline for casting ballots, then mail-in voting is prima facie not a great idea
What lawsuits? It means that more ballots will not be accepted, but if anything it should (very slightly) strengthen the case for people who claim they voted on time but were postmarked inaccurately.
There was plausible deniability on the part of the voter/sender.
Now there isn’t. Except I doubt that many people will actually know about the change/clarification so they’ll continue to mail ballots and taxes at the last second.
In a sane world, anything mailed “close enough” would be accepted. Or there’d be an explict 5-day grace period.
By admitting that the postmark date is a reflection of processing capability rather than voter action, the USPS has undermined the legal standard used in Pennsylvania and other states to determine the validity of late-arriving ballots. This reinforces the argument that mass mail-in voting relies on a logistical system that the USPS itself admits is not "perfectly reliable" for dating time-sensitive documents.
In states that require a postmark by Election Day to count a ballot received later, the operational reality of postmarking creates a chaotic environment where timely votes could be disqualified, or conversely, creates ambiguity about when a ballot actually entered the system.
It is unreasonable to expect every mail-in voter to stand in line at a post office to get a manual stamp to prove they voted on time. If the standard automated system cannot guarantee an accurate date, as this rule admits, then using that system for critical constitutional functions like voting is inherently flawed.
Seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. If you dump your ballot at the last possible minute in a box, your vote might not count. That was a risk before and maybe a slightly bigger risk now. So don’t do that. If you’re not sure, go vote in person.
If the postmark is more than a day after the mail-in deadline, even though it was first received by the local post office before it, it can be claimed there is no evidence it was submitted before the deadline and invalidate the balot.
That was already the case. This "rule" is not any kind of change in process, it's just a formal acknowledgement that the situation you're describing can happen. Why do you think that acknowledgement is a problem?
Right, this is how it has always been, if you wanted to insure a postmark you HAD to go into the post office and ask, otherwise there is are no promises, even if you mail it a week in advance it might not get a postmark.
You're muddying the waters by using the word "received".
The instant in time at which your letter is technically "received" by the USPS, in the sense of them having physical possession, has never mattered for any legal purposes whatsoever. That's because in many cases, there is absolutely no physical proof of exactly what instant in time that event happened.
Electoral rules aren't written based on when the USPS received your ballot, because that's typically unprovable. They're either based on when the ballot was delivered to the election office, or when the ballot was postmarked. The postmarking may happen at some point while the piece of mail is in USPS custody, or it may not happen at all if you don't specifically ask for it.
The rules are based on the postmark date because the postmark date is the only available documentary evidence of the date of mailing.
Again, this is not a change in policy, it's merely documenting the way the mail system has always worked.
> Electoral rules aren't written based on when the USPS received your ballot, because that's typically unprovable
Has anyone challenged their ballot being rejected by producing video showing them putting the ballot in an envelope and putting said envelope in a mailbox?
No, and to do so would be to challenge the law itself since the laws are written with reference to postmark date.
Perhaps ironically, video evidence has been used to invalidate ballots. In 2023, a CT judge invalidated the results of the Democratic primary, finding "ballot stuffing" in that 1,253 absentee ballots were submitted at Bridgeport dropboxes despite surveillance video only showing 420 people using the boxes. A new Democratic primary was ordered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023%E2%80%9324_Bridgeport,_Co...
Lots of folks might need to mail early or show up in person until regime change as governance infrastructure is sabotaged or degraded by people who might not otherwise be able to win.
Those people previously benefited from not being in power, so voters forgot how abjectly terrible they were. This was helped by conspiring media egging them on about price inflation, much of which had taken years to set in.
that's moving the goalposts of the comment I replied.
"people who might not otherwise be able to win" would mean that without this rule change, the current admin would not have been able to win. that's clearly not true. all this does, as you suggest, makes it harder for their opposition to use a valid means of voting.
DJT is fixated on anything where he can put his thumb on the scale. this is no different than demanding states gerrymander their maps in his favor. also, clearly DJT won, so not really sure what the argument here is. the original comment said unable to win. QED or some such
The same number of 55+ voters in the US that was the margin of victor for this election die in a year (~2M, ~5k/day). I admit, I'm unsure if those who voted for this have felt sufficient pain yet to vote better, and the votes of those who don't age out by election deadlines are hard to predict, but election results since the presidential election have been very favorable. NYC and Seattle have both elected democratic socialist mayors recently. Certainly, I have no doubt deep red parts of the country will continue to vote for this until death, but those parts of the country also have lower life expectency.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/behind-trump... ("Most adults who were eligible to vote in 2020 – but declined to do so – stayed home again in 2024. But among those who did turn out, Trump had the edge. Among all 2020 nonvoters (including those who were too young and ineligible to vote in 2020), 14% supported Trump in 2024 while 12% supported Harris.")
Observing demographic systems ("demographics are destiny") and its context within a political and governance system, and then building a thesis from those observations is simply academic. Attempting to predict the future isn't a fantasy (death or otherwise) imho, but I do enjoy trying to predict the future from observations and data. But, from your comment "A small price to pay for election integrity," (when elections were already high integrity) I can already deduce your mental model and that it is not grounded in facts or data.
> "We're going to start with an executive order that's being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail-in ballots because they're corrupt," Trump said later Monday, during a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the White House. "And it's time that the Republicans get tough and stop it because the Democrats want it. It's the only way they can get elected."
> Although Trump himself urged his supporters to vote using mail ballots prior to the 2024 election, Democrats have been significantly more likely to vote using mail-in ballots, compared to Republicans, since the 2020 election. That gap has only gotten wider in recent elections as GOP-led states have passed more restrictions on this method of voting.
> But legal experts say Trump does not have the legal authority to tell states how to run their elections.
As the saying goes, "Every accusation is a confession."
Not sure why you're being downvoted. This is exactly what it is. Now mail-in ballots that previously had to be dropped in the box by election day have to be dropped off days in advance.
The postmark isn't the stamp (piece of paper). It's the ink seal that's stamped over the stamp with the date on it. It doesn't matter how you pay for the piece of mail; it now potentially get postmarked at a later date than previously.
Request a Manual Postmark: Customers may present a mail piece at a retail counter and request a "manual (local) postmark". This postmark is applied at the time of acceptance, so the date aligns with the date the USPS took possession.
I should have said manual postmark but it’s what I implied. They’re stamping or postmarking it with a date manually.
Every voting cycle for at least the last 4 you have seen a certain class of citizen not understand why the early numbers come in from small, rural precincts who can finish early and then the densest areas come in later and vote for other people than their guy. I’m sure that this is being fed by people whose livelihood depends on misunderstanding the problem, but it’s something people should be taught in school and the civics curriculum went away sometime around No Child Left Behind. So this has been going on at least since GW Bush, and some of this bullshit tracks all the way back to Reagan.
Downvoted for the reason that I’ve not seen any credible evidence of massive election fraud, in the USA, since the suggestion of it in 2020. If you can point me to something credible, that proves even 1,000s of votes in a single district were impacted, (thereby stealing an election via mail fraud) I’ll remove my downvote.
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